Offensive Passer Rating

Through Week 1 of the 2011 Regular Season

About Offensive Passer Rating. Offensive Passer Rating is merely the commonly used measure of quarterbacks, applied to the entire team, so it measures the performance of each quarterback on the roster. Passer rating is often criticized by ignorant football "analysts" for being overly complex. But its usefulness as a measure of team success is truly underappreciated in the football community beyond the Mighty Cold, Hard Football Facts. Like all of our Quality Stats, which are based on efficiency, Offensive Passer Rating has a much higher Correlation to Victory than volume stats, such as passing yards. Most great teams throughout history have a very strong Offensive Passer Rating, even if they did not pass for a lot of yards (the 1960s Packers are perhaps the greatest example).The Cold, Hard Football Facts have issued countless studies of the importance of Offensive Passer Rating, Defensive Passer Rating and Passer Rating Differential, each of them critical Quality Stats, including here on SportsIllustrated.com in the summer of 2011.

Week 1 Offensive Passer Rating overview
Aaron Rodgers entered the 2011 season as the highest-rated quarterback in both regular-season and postseason NFL history. He didn't little to change that standing in Week 1, with an awesome 132.1 passer rating in Green Bay's 42-34 win over the Saints.

As a result of that performance, the Packers head into Week 2 No. 1 in the NFL in Offensive Passer Rating. Little surprise that Tom Brady's Patriots are near the top of the list, too (No. 3). But, with Peyton Manning down and out and Ben Roethlisberger's Steelers coming off an embarrasing loss to Baltimore, there is something of a changing of a guard with a lot of new teams and faces atop the Offensive Passer Rating leaderboard (at least for Week 1): Kevin Kolb and the Cardinals are No. 2, Matt Stafford and the Lions are No. 4, Joe Flacco and the Ravens are No. 5 and Ryan Fitzpatrick and the Bills are No. 6.

Fitzpatrick and the Bills would have been higher on the list, had not Brad Smith come in and promptly thrown an INT on his lone pass attempt for Buffalo. In fact, Fitzpatrick is the top-rated individual quarterback in football after Week 1 (133.0), higher even than Rodgers and Brady.